February 13, 2023
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Researchers in the U.K. have achieved something of a world first: they have manufactured blood in the lab, which they’ve since administered to humans. The clinical trial will aim to test the safety and effectiveness of the lab-made blood in at least 10 healthy people. Two volunteers have already received a dose. The scientists — from the University of Cambridge, the National Health Service and the University of Bristol — are keen to find out whether their novel blood can last as long as normal red blood cells (which normally stay alive for about 120 days inside the human body) and whether there are any side effects.
Transfusing donated blood has saved countless lives, allowing patients to get through complicated operations in good health. Blood products also help to treat chronic conditions such as sickle cell anemia. But blood donation, as a system, has many drawbacks. It requires a complicated infrastructure to collect and deliver blood where it’s needed safely. That requires adequate refrigeration all along the route, and while that might be relatively straightforward for developed countries, it remains a challenge elsewhere in the world. Rarer blood types also suffer from dwindling supplies in the blood banks, which often means it’s harder to find a suitable blood match for certain racial and ethnic groups. It’s also costly to maintain the infrastructure; the average donation of less than half a liter of blood costs the U.K.’s National Health Service approximately £130 ($155). That’s why scientists from around the world, often funded by military agencies, have been searching for more practical alternatives for decades. Still, it’s an endeavor that has thus far enjoyed limited success.
“After 9/11, the U.S. Army invested millions of dollars in producing a blood replicant to be used for casualties in the battlefield, but it came to naught,” says Lt. Col. Matthew Armstrong, who studies the fluid dynamics of blood at the United States Military Academy at West Point.
(more…)
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Tags: blood banks, lab-made blood, National Health Service, oxygen-carrying role, Rarer blood types, red cells, refrigeration, sickle cell anemia, stem cells, Transfusing donated blood, University of Bristol, University of Cambridge, West Point
February 6, 2023
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Genes that trigger cancer could be turned off - before people are even born, according to new research. Scientists have found a tumour 'switch' that develops hours after fertilisation. The discovery offers hope of a screening program, personalised vaccines - or even embryo engineering.
"Our work could open a new clinical chapter for the early detection of cancer," sait Co author Professor Tony Perry, of the University of Bath.
In experiments on mice, the international team found gene activity in embryos kicks off within four hours of sperm injection. These include 'oncogenes' which have the potential to cause cancer - if mutated. The findings are expected to apply to humans. "Many factors responsible for the dawn of gene activity in embryos have long been known to be major oncogenes," explained Prof Perry. It is the first time a pre-set order of events has been established in one-cell embryos in any species.
When an embryo is formed, its genes – donated by a fertilising sperm and egg – are silent. Somehow, at an early stage of development, embryo genes must be switched on. Without this vital 'genes on' switch in the embryo, none of us would be here, yet surprisingly little is known about what the switch looks like, or the identity of the 'molecular finger' that pushes the switch.
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| Tags: birth, cancer, cells, egg, embryo engineering, embryologists, embryos, genes, messenger RNA, molecular finger, mRNA, mutation, oncogenes, proteins, sequencing, sperm, switch, tumour 'switch', University of Bath, University of Cambridge
December 2, 2021
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Compared to OLEDs, which are widely used in high-end consumer electronics, the perovskite-based LEDs, developed by researchers at the University of Cambridge, can be made at much lower costs, and can be tuned to emit light across the visible and near-infrared spectra with high colour purity.
The researchers have engineered the perovskite layer in the LEDs to show close to 100% internal luminescence efficiency, opening up future applications in display, lighting and communications, as well as next-generation solar cells.
These perovskite materials are of the same type as those found to make highly efficient solar cells that could one day replace commercial silicon solar cells. While perovskite-based LEDs have already been developed, they have not been nearly as efficient as conventional OLEDs at converting electricity into light.
Earlier hybrid perovskite LEDs, first developed by Professor Sir Richard Friend’s group at the University’s Cavendish Laboratory four years ago, were promising, but losses from the perovskite layer, caused by tiny defects in the crystal structure, limited their light-emission efficiency.
Now, Cambridge researchers from the same group and their collaborators have shown that by forming a composite layer of the perovskites together with a polymer, it is possible to achieve much higher light-emission efficiencies, close to the theoretical efficiency limit of thin-film OLEDs. Their results are reported in the journal Nature Photonics.
“This perovskite-polymer structure effectively eliminates non-emissive losses, the first time this has been achieved in a perovskite-based device,” said Dr Dawei Di from Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, one of the corresponding authors of the paper. “By blending the two, we can basically prevent the electrons and positive charges from recombining via the defects in the perovskite structure.”
Source: https://www.cam.ac.uk/
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| Tags: crystal structure, high-end consumer electronics, LED, near-infrared, OLED, perovskite, polymer, silicon solar cells, solar cells, University of Cambridge
November 11, 2021
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A dementia diagnosis usually starts with a family member noticing that something isn’t quite right: a partner becoming forgetful, a normally placid parent losing their temper more often. From there, there are doctor’s appointments—memory and behavior tests that haven’t changed in years, brain scans if the money is there, or one of the battery of new blood tests looking for the biomarkers of brain damage. And then: nothing.
Neurodegenerative diseases like dementia and Alzheimer’s are more feared than cancer and heart disease combined, according to a 2016 survey, and one of the most frightening things about them is how little we still know. There are no cures, and few effective treatments.
So you might question the benefits of a 5-minute test that can assess your risk of getting dementia before you show any symptoms. The Integrated Cognitive Assessment (ICA) test, developed by the British startup Cognetivity Neurosciences, has been granted Food and Drug Administration clearance to be marketed in the United States and is being trialled at several NHS trusts in the UK. But is there any point in taking a test for a disease you can’t do anything about?
The ICA is designed as a “semi-supervised” screening test, says Cognetivity CEO Sina Habibi. It could form part of an annual health check-up for the over-50s, looking for the earliest signs of neurodegenerative disease before they become apparent in behavior. “In the same way you look at blood pressure, you could look at the brain with a cognitive test to see if there’s something malfunctioning,” he says.
An early diagnosis could help people plan ahead and put their affairs in order—but arguably that’s something they should probably be doing anyway. Lifestyle tweaks such as eating less fat, exercising more, or drinking less can also reduce risk, particularly in vascular dementia, which is caused by poor blood supply to the brain and is therefore closely linked to heart health.
The procedure runs on an iPad. A zebra appears onscreen and then disappears, replaced by a railway bridge. There are flashes of beach scenes in black and white, and then a glimpse of an exotic bird, all interspersed with monochrome grids and fuzzy static—a captcha at warp speed. The user’s task is simple: They tap on the right side of the screen whenever they see an animal in one of the pictures, and on the left side when they don’t.
The test, which was spun out of research at the University of Cambridge, is billed as a quick and easy replacement for the pen and paper memory tests often used early in a dementia diagnosis. (In the widely-employed Montreal Cognitive Assessment, for instance, subjects have to name animals from line drawings, read a list of words and repeat them, or copy a drawing of a cube.) The ICA instead uses an AI, trained on patients with early-onset dementia, which combines the subject’s speed and accuracy on the iPad task with information on lifestyle, age, ethnicity, and other factors to calculate a risk score.
Rather than measuring memory or executive function, it aims to assess the raw information processing speed of the visual system, with a test that should work the same regardless of someone’s language skills, cultural background, or education level, according to Habibi. “We’re focussing on the CPU of the brain rather than the hard drive,” he says. It leans on the fact that our visual processing system, when healthy, has apparently evolved to quickly detect animals—hence the zebra—so any slowdown in this process could hint at an underlying problem.
At the end of the test, participants hand the iPad back to their doctor or nurse, who taps in a passcode to gain access to the patient’s risk score from 1 to 100, with anything over 50 indicating an elevated risk of dementia. It’s up to the medical professional how they choose to present that information.
There are concerns that, given the lack of treatment options, widespread use of screening tests may only serve to overwhelm the health system with anxious people who have been told they are at risk of dementia but aren’t yet showing symptoms. “I worry that this will have huge implications for people. There isn’t the infrastructure to fully support families affected by dementia,” says Karen Harrison Dening, head of research and publications at the charity Dementia UK. Already, she says, the NHS often doesn’t have enough money to pay for brain scans for everyone who needs one in the UK. “Where are they going to go for that post-test counseling?” she asks. “We just don’t have the infrastructure—and there is a moral obligation to support them.”
Source: https://www.wired.com/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: AI, Alzheimer's, behavior, biomarkers, blood tests, brain damage, brain scans, Cognetivity, Cognetivity Neuroscience, dementia, ICA, Integrated Cognitive Assessment, iPad, memory, neurodegenerative diseases, test, University of Cambridge
March 2, 2021
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A coronavirus variant called B1525 has become one of the most recent additions to the global variant watch list and has been included in the list of variants under investigation by Public Health England.
Scientists are keeping a watchful eye on this variant because it has several mutations in the gene that makes the spike protein – the part of the virus that latches onto human cells. These changes include the presence of the increasingly well-known mutation called E484K, which allows the virus to partly evade the immune system, and is found in the variants first identified in South Africa (B1351) and Brazil (P1).
While there is no information on what this means for B1525, there is growing evidence that E484K may impact how effective COVID vaccines are. But there is no suggestion so far that B1525 is more transmissible or that it leads to more severe disease.
There are other mutations in B1525 that are also noteworthy, such as Q677H. Scientists have repeatedly detected this change – at least six times in different lineages in the US, suggesting that it gives the virus an advantage, although the nature of any benefit has not been identified yet.
The B1525 variant also has several deletions – where “letters” (G, U, A and C) of the virus’s RNA are missing from its genome. These letters are also missing in B117, the variant first detected in Kent, England. Research by Ravindra Gupta, a clinical microbiologist at the University of Cambridge, found that these deletions may increase infectivity twofold in laboratory experiments.
As with many variants, B1525 appears to have emerged quite recently. The earliest example in the shared global database of coronavirus genomes, called Gisaid, dates from 15 December 2020. It was identified in a person in the UK. And like many variants, B1525 had already travelled the world before it came to global attention. A total of 204 sequences of this variant in Gisaid can be traced to 18 countries as of 20 February 2021.
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| Tags: B1351, B1525, cells, coronavirus variant, COVID, gene, Gisaid, immune system, mutation, mutation E484K, P1, Public Health England, Q677H, RNA, spike protein, University of Cambridge, vaccine, virus
November 6, 2020
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Scientists have found a new way to regenerate damaged optic nerve cells taken from mice and grown in a dish. This exciting development could lead to potential eye disease treatments in the future. Damage to full-grown nerve cells causes irreversible and life-altering consequences, because once nerve fibres mature, they lose their ability to regenerate after injury or disease. The new experiments show how activating part of a nerve cell’s regenerative machinery, a protein known as protrudin, could stimulate nerves in the eye to regrow after injury.
With more research, the achievement is a step towards future treatments for glaucoma, a group of eye diseases which cause vision loss by damaging the optic nerve (that links the eye to the brain).
“What we’ve seen is the strongest regeneration of any technique we’ve used before,” said ophthalmologist Keith Martin from the University of Melbourne in Australia. “In the past it seemed impossible we would be able to regenerate the optic nerve but this research shows the potential of gene therapy to do this.”
In this study, scientists stimulated nerve cells of the eye to produce more protrudin, to see if this would help protect the cells from damage and even repair after injury. First, in optical nerve cells cultured in a dish, the researchers showed that ramping up protrudin production stimulated regeneration of nerve cells that had been cut by a laser. Their spindly axons regenerated over longer distances, and in less time, than untreated cells. Next, adult mice were administered gene therapy – an injection straight into the eye – carrying instructions for nerve cells to bump up protrudin production. As painful as that sounds, this procedure can actually be done safely in people (the injection, that is, not yet the gene therapy).
A few weeks and one optic nerve injury later, these mice had more surviving nerve cells in their retinas than the control group did. In one final experiment, the scientists used whole retinas from mice removed two weeks after giving them a protrudin boost, to see if this treatment could prevent nerve cells from dying in the first place. The researchers found, three days later, that stimulating protrudin production had been almost “entirely neuroprotective, with these retinas exhibiting no loss of [retinal] neurons,” the researchers wrote in their paper. Usually, about half of retinal neurons removed in this way die within a couple of days.
“Our strategy relies on using gene therapy – an approach already in clinical use – to deliver protrudin into the eye,” said Veselina Petrova, a neuroscience student at the University of Cambridge. “It’s possible our treatment could be further developed as a way of protecting retinal neurons from death, as well as stimulating their axons to regrow.”
Source: https://www.cam.ac.uk/
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| Tags: axons, eye disease, gene therapy, glaucoma, optic nerve cells, protein, protrudin, regenaration, retinas, University of Cambridge, University of Melbourne
May 14, 2019
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The smallest pixels yet created – a million times smaller than those in smartphones, made by trapping particles of light under tiny rocks of gold – could be used for new types of large-scale flexible displays, big enough to cover entire buildings. The colour pixels, developed by a team of scientists led by the University of Cambridge, are compatible with roll-to-roll fabrication on flexible plastic films, dramatically reducing their production cost.
It has been a long-held dream to mimic the colour-changing skin of octopus or squid, allowing people or objects to disappear into the natural background, but making large-area flexible display screens is still prohibitively expensive because they are constructed from highly precise multiple layers. At the centre of the pixels developed by the Cambridge scientists is a tiny particle of gold a few billionths of a metre across. The grain sits on top of a reflective surface, trapping light in the gap in between. Surrounding each grain is a thin sticky coating which changes chemically when electrically switched, causing the pixel to change colour across the spectrum.
The team of scientists, from different disciplines including physics, chemistry and manufacturing, made the pixels by coating vats of golden grains with an active polymer called polyaniline and then spraying them onto flexible mirror-coated plastic, to dramatically drive down production cost. The pixels are the smallest yet created, a million times smaller than typical smartphone pixels. They can be seen in bright sunlight and because they do not need constant power to keep their set colour, have an energy performance that makes large areas feasible and sustainable. “We started by washing them over aluminized food packets, but then found aerosol spraying is faster,” said co-lead author Hyeon-Ho Jeong from Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory.
“These are not the normal tools of nanotechnology, but this sort of radical approach is needed to make sustainable technologies feasible,” said Professor Jeremy J Baumberg of the NanoPhotonics Centre at Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, who led the research. “The strange physics of light on the nanoscale allows it to be switched, even if less than a tenth of the film is coated with our active pixels. That’s because the apparent size of each pixel for light is many times larger than their physical area when using these resonant gold architectures.”
The pixels could enable a host of new application possibilities such as building-sized display screens, architecture which can switch off solar heat load, active camouflage clothing and coatings, as well as tiny indicators for coming internet-of-things devices.
The results are reported in the journal Science Advances.
Source: https://www.cam.ac.uk/
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| Tags: camouflage clothing, coating, flexible displays, particles of light, pixels, plastic films, polyaniline, polymer, University of Cambridge
March 18, 2019
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The “internal wiring” of breast cancer can predict which women are more likely to survive or relapse, say researchers. The study shows that breast cancer is 11 separate diseases that each has a different risk of coming back. The hope is that the findings, in the journal Nature, could identify people needing closer monitoring and reassure others at low risk of recurrence.
Cancer Research UK said that the work was “incredibly encouraging” but was not yet ready for widespread use. The scientists, at the University of Cambridge and Stanford University, looked in incredible detail at nearly 2,000 women’s breast cancers. They went far beyond considering all breast cancers as a single disease and beyond modern medicine’s way of classifying the tumours.
Doctors currently classify breast cancers based on whether they respond to the hormone oestrogen or targeted therapies like Herceptin. The research team analysed the genetic mutations inside the tumour to create a new way of classifying them.
By following women for 20 years, they are now able to show which types of breast cancer are more likely to come back. “This is really biology-driven, it’s the molecular wiring of your tumour, said Prof Carlos Caldas. “Once and for all we need to stop talking about breast cancer as one disease, it’s a constellation of 11 diseases. “This is a very significant step to more precision-type medicine.”
Source: https://www.bbc.com/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: breast cancer, cancer relapse, genetic mutations, Herceptin, hormone oestrogen, internal wiring, Stanford University, tumours, University of Cambridge
January 30, 2019
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Researchers at the School of Engineering and Applied Science, the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, and the University of Cambridge have built a sheet of nickel with nanoscale pores that make it as strong as titanium, but four to five times lighter. The empty space of the pores, and the self-assembly process in which they’re made, make the porous metal akin to a natural material, such as wood. And just as the porosity of wood grain serves the biological function of transporting energy, the empty space in the researchers’ “metallic wood” could be infused with other materials. Infusing the scaffolding with anode and cathode materials would enable this metallic wood to serve double duty: a plane wing or prosthetic leg that’s also a battery. The study was led by James Pikul, assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics at Penn Engineering.
Metallic wood foil on a plastic backing
“The reason we call it metallic wood is not just its density, which is about that of wood, but its cellular nature,” Pikul says. “Cellular materials are porous; if you look at wood grain, that’s what you’re seeing—parts that are thick and dense and made to hold the structure, and parts that are porous and made to support biological functions, like transport to and from cells.”
The study has been published in Nature Scientific Reports,
Source: https://penntoday.upenn.edu/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: anode, battery, cathode, Metallic Wood, nanoscale pores, nickel, Penn Engineering, titanium, University of Cambridge, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, UPenn
August 1, 2018
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Researchers have identified a group of materials that could be used to make even higher power batteries. The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, used materials with a complex crystalline structure and found that lithium ions move through them at rates that far exceed those of typical electrode materials, which equates to a much faster-charging battery. Although these materials, known as niobium tungsten oxides, do not result in higher energy densities when used under typical cycling rates, they come into their own for fast charging applications. Additionally, their physical structure and chemical behaviour give researchers a valuable insight into how a safe, super-fast charging battery could be constructed, and suggest that the solution to next-generation batteries may come from unconventional materials.
Many of the technologies we use every day have been getting smaller, faster and cheaper each year – with the notable exception of batteries. Apart from the possibility of a smartphone which could be fully charged in minutes, the challenges associated with making a better battery are holding back the widespread adoption of two major clean technologies: electric cars and grid-scale storage for solar power.
“We’re always looking for materials with high-rate battery performance, which would result in a much faster charge and could also deliver high power output,” said Dr Kent Griffith, a postdoctoral researcher in Cambridge’s Department of Chemistry and the paper’s first author.
In their simplest form, batteries are made of three components: a positive electrode, a negative electrode and an electrolyte. When a battery is charging, lithium ions are extracted from the positive electrode and move through the crystal structure and electrolyte to the negative electrode, where they are stored. The faster this process occurs, the faster the battery can be charged. In the search for new electrode materials, researchers normally try to make the particles smaller. “The idea is that if you make the distance the lithium ions have to travel shorter, it should give you higher rate performance,” said Griffith. “But it’s difficult to make a practical battery with nanoparticles: you get a lot more unwanted chemical reactions with the electrolyte, so the battery doesn’t last as long, plus it’s expensive to make.”
“Nanoparticles can be tricky to make, which is why we’re searching for materials that inherently have the properties we’re looking for even when they are used as comparatively large micron-sized particles. This means that you don’t have to go through a complicated process to make them, which keeps costs low,” explained Professor Clare Grey, also from the Department of Chemistry and the paper’s senior author. “Nanoparticles are also challenging to work with on a practical level, as they tend to be quite ‘fluffy’, so it’s difficult to pack them tightly together, which is key for a battery’s volumetric energy density.”
The results are reported in the journal Nature.
Source: https://www.cam.ac.uk/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: crystallography, Electric Vehicule, ev, lithium ions, materials, niobium tungsten oxides, solar power, University of Cambridge
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